Monday, December 13, 2010

Late Style's perfunctoriness

Tim Parks writes of his experience of translating the late novels and stories of Alberto Moravia: "I was struck by the almost cavalier perfunctoriness of the late books, combined with a ruthless narrative dispatch."

Adorno speaks of this, echoed by Said etc...

Friday, December 3, 2010

Only nature

"This confirmed me in my resolve to keep to Nature alone in future. Only Nature has inexhaustible riches, and only Nature creates a great artist." - Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (Penguin classic, p.32)

Turner wanting future generations to know nature through his work.

Pollock's somewhat defiant declaration: "I am nature" (made in response to a query if he worked from nature). In the context of Dante's statement that art is the child of nature, and thus the grandchild of God, Pollock seems blasphemous. In the context of the Origin of Species, he seems merely accurate.

Thursday, December 2, 2010

Biscuits and cake and the rod

"Daß die Kinder nicht wissen, warum sie wollen, darin sind alle hochgelahrten Schul--und Hofmeister einig; daß aber auch Erwachsene gleich Kindern auf diesem Erdboden herumtaumeln und wie jene nicht wissen, woher sie kommen und wohin sie gehen, ebensowenig nach wahren Zwecken handeln, ebenso durch Biskuit und Kuchen und Birkenreiser regiert werden: das will niemand gern glauben, und mich dünkt, man kann es mit Händen greifen."

"All our learned teachers and educators are agreed that children do not know why they want what they want, but no one is willing to believe that adults too, like children, wander about this earth in a daze and, like children, do not know where they come from or where they are going, act as rarely as they do according to genuine motives, and are as thoroughly governed as they are by biscuits and cake and the rod. And yet it seems palpably clear to me." - Goethe, The Sorrows of Young Werther (p.31, Penguin classic).

There is an interesting language difference between the sturdy Old English monosyllable "rod" (from the Old Norse "rudda" meaning "club") and the Germanic "Birkenreiser" ... "birch twigs".

Giuseppe Mazzotta - in his Yale lectures on Dante - explains that Dante perceives the problem of living to be a problem of the will, rather than the more simplistic classical view that it is a problem of knowledge. It is not enough to know the definition of justice, say; one must have the will to be just. We often know what is good for us, but choose something other. And that is perhaps the idea of sin: sin as error, a missing of the mark, a falling short, a failure of the will.